Dreamspell
is a calendric system intended to transform its users, and the world, by
entraining the consciousness into a non-linear cyclical time count based on the
lunar rhythm. As a philosophical or metaphysical system it should be examined
for its usefulness in facilitating what it claims. It appears to be the
creation of one visionary thinker, José Argüelles, and thus anyone is justified
in questioning its tenets, challenging its claims, and providing contextual
information related to its development. On another level, in reading the
Dreamspell literature one gets the impression that the system is not the
creation of one human being, but the revelation of a higher dimensional entity
associated with the Mayan king Pacal. In fact, several years ago Argüelles
proclaimed himself dead and is now to be known as Valum Votan. If this is the
case, and Dreamspell is a revelation much like the Bible or the Koran, then we
should examine it closely and discern the intention of the information coming
through. What effect does it have? What does it do? Otherwise we put ourselves
in the position of being a follower and trusting in the spiritual attainments
and integrity of a perceived guru / prophet figure, especially if clear
disclosures of truth are not provided. This guru-worship has its downside, of
course, and in my touring experience it is especially prevalent on the West
Coast. The best way to explore the efficacy of the Dreamspell system is to
determine if it does what it claims it can do. Secondarily, we can weigh
testimonials of those who use it with good effect and those who have decided to
not use it, and simply share the reasons why.

Testimonials

I’ll keep this section brief. Many people following the
Dreamspell day-count report that it works. The 260-day cycle is an oracle. Any
oracle will respond if you pour energy into it. Nothing can sway a person’s
commitment to a given ideology or system of thought, however flawed it may be shown
to be. So there isn’t much more to be said on that account, considering that I
wrote the Dreamspell-sponsored Time Bandit newsletter more than ten
years ago to inform them of the existence of the surviving Mayan calendar; they
didn’t know about it, and they didn’t care (or didn’t believe it). But partly
due to my satirical writing tactics, this truth did eventually get acknowledged
by some—even while they chose to continue following Dreamspell. For me this
issue has always been about clarity, discernment, and choice. For those who
abandoned following Dreamspell, the reasons given are as follows (distilled
from hundreds of email and letters since 1992): 1. Realized that it was not
aligned with the Mayan day-count. 2. Believed they had been misled by the
general claim or implicationthat the
Dreamspell system was the same as the Mayan calendar (clear disclosure of the
truth was absent). 3. Detected a cultic displeasure when questions were raised
during group meetings. 4. Personal experiences with the Dreamspell creator
and/or inner circle that were unpleasant. 5. Felt they had been
hypnotized.

Inconsistencies

Following the Mayan insight into the harmonic nature of the
260-day sacred cycle, Dreamspell also uses the 260-day cycle to highlight the
occurrence of synchronicities that reveal a deeper interweaving of life’s
events. Every 260 days the same day-glyph and number combination will recur,
revealing a harmonic relation which is ultimately based on our first,
collectively shared, cycle of unfoldment—the nine-month period of
embryogenesis. Naturally, all significant events in life unfold in a 260-day
rhythm or harmonics thereof. This is a fantastic Mayan insight into the nature
of time. The 260-day cycle is also a generalized key that unites multiple
dimensions of human experience: human biological unfolding, agricultural
planting and harvesting cycles, and cycles in the sky such as eclipses.

One’s birthday in the 260-day cycle is important, for it
defines future day-sign resonances. However, a non-Mayan practice of
day-skipping was implemented in Dreamspell that violates the harmonic integrity
of the 260-day resonance. Simply put, your birthday should recur every 260
days. Because the Dreamspell system does not count February 29th,
the oracular integrity of the 260-day count is lost. Dreamspell proponents
claim that February 29th is an artifact of the Gregorian calendar,
and thus to skip it we actually entrain ourselves with the “real” field. This
is afallacy derived from actually
taking seriously the Western astronomical convention of fractioning the year
count to 365.2422 days (thus every four years an additional day is needed).
Mayan time philosophy does not heed fractions or other abstractions—which would
remove ones perception from the immediacy of temporal experience. Rather, the
Mayan day-keepers simply count every day. (It seems absurd that this is a
principle that even needs to be emphasized.) The effect of simply counting
every day allows the celebration of New Years Day to fall back through the
year, one day every four years, completing one full round in 1,507 years. But
that shifting is not perceived as a “problem” and is considered less important
than preserving the internal integrity of the sacred, lunar-based, time rhythm.
In other words, the precise solar year is less critical than the sacred
cycle—which is true if you are concerned with following a sacred rhythm and
dispensing with solar-year abstractions. This is precisely what Dreamspell
proclaims to offer, to remove us from the “12:60” nightmare, but in fact by
skipping February 29thit
reveals a prioritizing of the solar year over the lunar cycle.

Why Should the Moon Fit into the Sun?

This same fallacy of subjecting the lunar cycle to the solar
cycle is found in the 13-moon calendar, which runs alongside the 260-day cycle
and the solar year counting in Dreamspell. The 13-moon calendar consists of 13
moons of 28 days each, with one “day out of time” at the end to make 365 days.
(Notice that the “day out of time”, July 25, is not the same as skipping
February 29th).Following
this moon rhythm is supposed to be the key which allows us to disengage from
the 12:60 (12 solar months, 60 minutes)—the abstract Western nightmare of
materialism that obscures natural rhythms. However, no lunar rhythm consists of
28 days, and it should be noted that the Maya themselves did not use a 13-moon
calendar. In Dreamspell rationale, 28 days is claimed to be an average of the
27.3-day sidereal month and the 29.53-day phase cycle. If scientific precision
is being invoked here to validate the thesis, however, the average is not very
accurate. In addition, this kind of rationalized operation is one iterative
abstraction away from the experienced rhythm of the lunar cycle, and thus is
guilty of the same lamentable abstractions of Western science. And why even
abstract the lunar cycle? Why not just track it in the sky, do rituals, and
entrain with it? The purpose of choosing a 28-day, 13-moon cycle of 364 days
(plus 1 “day out of time”) is apparently to fit the lunar cycle evenly
into the solar cycle. I’m picturing Victorian corsets here; or the bound feet
of Japanese girls. In other words, like the example previously described,
Dreamspell gives precedence to the solar year and the sacred lunar rhythm must
be crammed into it to create the appearance of mathematical commensuration.
This is an abstracting operation, a human fiddling with the sacred rhythms in
which we are embedded, whereas the Mayan day-keepers themselves were and are
concerned only with the “thing in itself”—the experiential reality of the
complex interweaving cycles in which we live. This provides a richness of
experience rather than a denatured framework that has rhythmic closure.

There is harmonic commensuration in the appropriate use of
the of the 260-day sacred calendar in relation to other cycles observed by the
Maya (eclipses, solar, Venus), and we find this in the rich traditions of the
Long Count and Calendar Round. Any model or system has its deficiencies, but
certain principles are elementary (such as not skipping days) and must be
adhered to if the system is to work harmonically. (As an aside, the highest
harmonic commensuration of time cycles is found in the 25,920-year precession
of the equinoxes, which we are approaching the end of via the solstice-galaxy
alignment of era-2012. In Vedic, Babylonian, Eddic, and other traditions, this
master-key cycle is alluded to primarily with the numbers 12 and 60, calling
into question the wisdom of judging these number as responsible for the
decadence of modern civilization.)

Day-Count Redundo

Finally, there remains the issue of the Dreamspell day-count
placement being at odds with the traditional Mayan day-count (the 584283,
Classic-period, or “true” count). It is currently (in 2002) 50 days out of
synchronization with the traditional count. Furthermore, because Dreamspell
skips February 29th, the discrepancy becomes 49 days in early 2004,
48 days in early 2008, and so on. This brings up the question of the validity
and unbroken continuity of the “true” count that I defend. Ignoring all the
ethnographic evidence I’ve assembled—much of it coming from excellent
first-rate scholarship in the field of Mayan Studies—Dreamspell proponents
retain a facile and out-dated argument that the Maya have dozens of calendars
that all disagree. This statement is simply incorrect, and reveals a vagueness
with terminology that, despite my clarifications, serves to denounce or
disempower the surviving traditional count. What I tried to share clearly in my
book Tzolkin (1992/1994) and other writings is the fact that the ancient
Maya (in fact all of Mesoamerica) did have a universally shared day-count, and
this “true” count has survived up to the present day among traditional Mayan
groups in the western Highlands of Guatemala. This is the day-count that is at
odds with the Dreamspell day-count. And to dispel another fallacy, we can
thereby understand that this controversy is not a choice between the Argüelles
count and the Jenkins count; I am merely an advocate for the traditional Mayan
day-count that survives today despite the attempted conquest and other
obfuscations. The idea that the Maya had “many calendars” (e.g., Mars, Venus,
Long Count, haab) does not mean they had different day-count placements. This and
other misunderstandings derive from not understanding the elementary basics of
the Mayan calendar’s operation. (I understand these misconceptions because in
the past I’ve made some of them myself, but they were dispelled as my calendar
studies evolved. I always assumed that this kind of dispelling of previous
misconceptions was what having a gnostic relationship with the sacred calendar
was supposed to be about.)

The Signs of the Times

Now, some claim that it is necessary to update old
traditions into a modern terminology, to fit the mentality of modern people,
and the Dreamspell system fills this need. This may work to some degree, but
only if truth is preserved in the conversion. The main problem with this
strategy of bringing ancient wisdom into modern consciousness is that modern
consciousness is not a sufficient container for the higher dimensional
perspectives we find in ancient traditions. Instead, modern consciousness needs
to be transformed, elevated or enlarged dimensionally, to embrace ancient
wisdom. If you go the other way around, it’s like trying to cram the sacred
into the secular, the higher dimensional vision into a lower dimensional plane.
This lamentable situation of adapting the higher to the lower, rather than
subsuming the lower into the higher, is evident in Greek borrowings from
Oriental wisdom and continues today, most recently in the strategies of
“popularizing” undertaken by New Age publishers in the 1980s. This entire
situation, that of new adaptations that eclipse traditional wisdom being
celebrated in a modern consciousness that is addicted to newness, is aptly
exposed in Rene Guenon’s books The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the
Times and An Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines. Speaking
of the Greek appropriation and subsequent debasement of Oriental wisdom
teachings, Guenon writes:

It is nevertheless true that the
Greeks did possess a certain measure of originality, though not of the kind
usually supposed; it was largely confined to the form under which they presented
and displayed borrowed ideas, which they altered more or less happily in the
process of adapting them to suit their own mentality, so unlike the mentality
of the Orientals, and in many respects directly opposed to it. (An
Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines, 33-34).

And as we have moved foreword through the current epoch, the
human mentality hasincreased its
estrangement from transcendent truth such that now, at the terminal moment of
the Age of Iron, human consciousness is largely fixated upon a completely
fragmented materialism. Obviously, it is not advisable to adapt ancient truth
to this kind of mentality. What results is a shadow of the truth, projected
into a lower dimensional plane of perception. Because a grain of truth can be sensed
at the root of the all-new, modernized, low-fat metaphysical systems, its
proponents will vigorously defend it. However, the ultimate end result of such
adaptation is a complete inversion in the representation of ancient wisdom,
sort of a systemic paradox that is not what it is and is what it isn’t.
Polarized paradoxes that manifest at the end of a historical cycle thus achieve
a kind of transcendence through manifesting opposed poles that appear
contradictory but are united in a higher dimensional space. If we do not take
sides, or if we realize our role in the dyadic cyclone of generation that
ensues, such paradoxes invite us to ascend to a higher perspective to resolve
lower dimensional conflict. In this sense, Dreamspell can only be construed as
a litmus test for conscious discernment, and so provides a great service.
During the end times, nothing is as it appears, and truth is inverted (thus the
post-historic absurdity of spiritual materialism). The development of
discernment is an early stage on the journey to enlightenment. In politics,
metaphysics, or relationships, discernment and clarity are keys to moving
toward the truth, and the light.

In closing…

The Thirteen Moon Calendar booklet for 2002-2003 provides an
interesting rationale for following the 13-moon calendar. Basically, since the
Gregorian months are of different lengths, and don’t correspond with new and
full moon periods, then our minds becomebent by following this crooked measure. Gandhi did not become bent by
living under foreign imperialistic control. I don’t start cheering for the
Broncos simply because all my neighbors do. People are not required to be
controlled by their parent paradigm. In other words, deep spiritual connection
with natural rhythms (or truth) does not necessarily become obscured by a
superficial and artificial overlay of a value or a measuring system. It only
does so if we are stuck in externals, which one can remain stuck in no matter
which calendar one follows. If we are lost in the world of externals, we can
withdraw into the realm of essence to get back in touch with our
root-connection with all. Then we resonate internally, spiritually, with our
own periodicity of unfolding that is rooted in the lunar cycle via our
primordial gestation period. A replacement calendar that is just as inaccurate
as the Gregorian calendar in its ability to measure true moon cycles, even
though it is clever and cool, will not help us do this. To see what a really
accurate lunar calendar would look like, check out Peter Meyer’s Goddess
Calendar: http://serendipity.magnet.ch/hermetic/cal_stud/maya.htm.

My book Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar
Studies has recently been re-released on CD-Rom for IBM-PC (designed like a
website). It contains an extensive additional resource called Tzolkin 2,
consisting of relevant documents and correspondence relating to various issues,
such as the correlation question, the Dreamspell day-count controversy,
articles and interviews I did to promote Tzolkin, a review, and a reader
response.For more information on this and my other books, including Maya
Cosmogenesis 2012 (1998) and Galactic Alignment (2002), see my
website: http://Alignment2012.com.